Just a few years ago it seems that the critical community was all up in arms about what they dubbed “torture porn,” their label for horror films with an emphasis on helpless people receiving a going over from madmen or -women. More sympathetic writers sociologized the trend as a reflection of current affairs, vague mixed feelings about Abu Graib, for example, but for the most part the reviewers lashed out at these films, among them the two Hostels, Captivity, and the Saw series, for their callousness and crudity and pandering to what was perceived as the masses appetite for torture.

Now, in the wake of its May 30th opening, the new horror film The Strangers has received an unusually positive flow of reviews, despite its falling under the general umbrella of so-called torture porn. Starting with the New York Times, and including such diverse forums as at the Village Voice, the Los Angeles Times, and even the usually acerbic, or at least refreshingly tough, Slant, all praised this first feature by youngster Bryan Bertino. It turns out, culling praise from these reviews, that for a horror film to succeed with the reviewers, it must be discreet in its terrorizing, it must have good actors playing complex characters rather than stick figures, it must emphasize creepiness over blood, and the film is more successful if the sound effects track plays the role of an additional character. Only Roger Ebert, while also praising the neophyte’s command of his craft, suggested that there might be something evil about The Strangers.

The Strangers is technically accomplished as far as it goes, the way an episode of a TV anthology horror series might happen to be innovative, or like Spielberg’s Duel, clever on a limited budget. Though there is an attempt to characterize the two main characters, James Hoyt (Scott Speedman) and Kristen McKay (Liv Tyler), as sympathetic, we really don’t know too much about them. They have left a wedding party, where James asked Kristen to marry him, but she has refused. Like an Antonioni movie, The Strangers opens post-argument, as the couple arrives at James’s father’s isolated vacation house. In the course of the film’s trim 90 minute running time, the couple are assaulted by three masked visitants, two of them women. We never see their faces, or learn their motivation, so they remain strangers. Instead they just make their presence noisily felt, by banging loudly on doors and slowly sliding the tips of kitchen blades across table tops.

As most reviewers have pointed out, The Strangers, intentionally or not, is evocative of a recent French horror film, now out on DVD, called Them (Ils), in which a group of feral children terrorize a couple in similar circumstances, as well as of last year’s Vacancy, and Michael Haneke’s two Funny Games films, which also proffer a bleak view of human self defense against organized evil. As a home invasion film, the roots of The Strangers stretches back to The Desperate Hours, Key Largo, or The Petrified Forest, though these are crime films. The appeal is to the idea of a safe, sacred space unexpectedly dominated by strangers with no respect for the owners’ values. Most serial killer horror films, like Halloween, are essentially home invasion movies in their own way, but the horror films like those of the 1970s, and which are obviously an influence on Bertino, worked hard at providing motivation for the implacable killer, often as a surprise twist at the end. We learn nothing about this film’s strangers except that they practice horrible randomness. Text at the film’s start indicates that the story is based on real events, but though the date of these events is given as February 11th, 2005, in reality Bertino, according to hints in interviews, was probably thinking of the Sharon Tate murders by the Manson gang, a subject he has been obsessing on since he read Vincent Bugliosi’s book as a kid. If so, this is a stripped down vision of what might have gone on in the minds of both victims and perpetrators.

If The Strangers has any real or lasting appeal (it made $21 million its opening weekend), it will of course be on DVD, where, as if in some kind of William Castle promotion, the viewer is seeing the film in a vulnerable context that replicates that in the film itself. Why would people want to submit themselves to such nerve racking thoughts? Over the weekend, desperate for something entertaining to view to fill some time, I grabbed the DVD of The Towering Inferno off the unviewed shelf. I was actually shocked at how this 1974 film reveled in the horrible fates of some characters, and looked up Pauline Kael’s review, collected in her book Reeling, where she, to her credit, expressed a similar shock and disgust. I must be getting squeamish in my old age. In any case, for me the virtue of horror films has always been that, unique to most genres except noir, horror films offer the director more freedom to explore visual experiments. The Strangers actually sheds that opportunity, in order to concentrate, as in the torture porn movies, on the slow tormenting of victims. If someday Bertino really does do an adaptation of the events at the Tate-Polanski house, I might be interested, if he can balance the horror with some human truths and insights into those terrible events.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 3rd, 2008 at 8:16 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.